WHY YOU SHOULDN’T IGNORE MICRO INFLUENCERS ; FUTURE OF INFLUENCER MARKETING

What if you are told that micro influencers are the future of influencer marketing. Would you believe it? Marketing gurus and experts said that micro influencers will have a greater impact, and will become more prominent. It’s easy to underestimate the power of micro influencers and their small audience. They might be nothing compared to people with millions or even hundred thousands of followers. But surprisingly, they are actually powerful. Nowadays, brands tend to work with micro influencers that have a niche, smaller yet engaged audience due to the effectiveness.

Who are Micro Influencers?

First, let’s start with influencers.

Influencers are people who inspire or guide others' actions. They have the power to influence and persuade people to purchase products because of their knowledge and relationship with their audience. They have a niche that they actively engage with.

There are levels of influencers ; tiers of influencers. Levels of influencers can also be called as subcategories which are nano influencer, micro influencer, macro influencer and mega influencer. Those subcategories are defined by the size of the influencer's audience.

We can say that micro influencers are social media users that have tens of thousand followers, but not more than 100k just yet. They also have a good, consistent engagement ratios.

Micro influencers have relatively few followers (thousands, ten of thousands). They will be operating in a niche and have a number of niche followers that are particularly interested in the type of industry that micro influencers are operating in.

A smaller audience means much more interaction. With a smaller number of followers, their followers tend to see themselves as the influencer’s peers rather than fans.

“Micro-influencers drive 60% higher campaign engagement rates than macro-influencers.” -Ad Week

Why Micro Influencers?

Most people want to interact with influencers that are genuine, real and relatable. A Mediahub study found out that in some cases, Influencers that have less followers (1,000) are more likely to have 85% higher engagement than those who have more (100,000) followers. Another research in 2018 by a marketing social platform called SocialPubli.com analyzed internal campaign data and did a survey on 1,000 vetted micro influencers. They found out that micro influencers receive seven times more engagement than larger/mega influencers.

Brands usually pay influencers to talk about their brand. Instead, micro influencers are already talking about specific products or services because they have a specific interest and niche which allows brands to have the right target audience when working with micro influencers.

Cost effective

We can say then micro influencers are worth it. Why is that? As we all know, influencers with larger numbers of followers (mega influencers) have higher cost. Most brands focus more on the mega influencers which means, micro influencers have not been utilized as much by brands out there. Due to the case, working with micro influencers is obviously more cost-effective. Brands do not need to spend lots of money on mega influencers. An affordable price that micro influencers offer is really effective. Brands will have more return on investment with micro influencers.

Trustworthy

The most important thing is that micro influencers are trustworthy. They can build trust in their audiences since what they review/promote will be something that these influencers are interested in so they won’t just arrange words and recommend the brand to their audience without having knowledge about it. Trustworthy is really important. When working with micro influencers, brands will borrow the trustworthy reputation to connect brands with the audience.

Higher engagement rates

Micro influencers are able to interact through likes and responding to comments with their audience more often compared to influencers with larger audiences. Interaction between the influencer and their audience will quickly build and establish a connection.

Higher engagement rates means that they do not just post something and let it disappear. But they should be active in becoming an advocate for the brand.

Micro-influencers with smaller follower numbers typically have higher engagement ratios than larger influencers who may have hundreds of thousands of followers. The primary reason for this is just what we talked about before - niche content.

Niche content draws a niche following of people who talk about the same things, are excited by the same things, and who can create dialogues within the community around a single post.